I made a small freeware app that allows one to clone a drive (physical or logical) to/from another drive or image.

On top of that the tool can :

-save/restore the MBR or BS,
-delete the layout of the drive,
-wipe with 0's,
-create a raw image file,
-make a vmdk/vhd from a raw image file to boot your cloned disk in vmware,
-do various operations on the registry around booting,
-format any device to fat16/fat32/ntfs/exfat/udf (includig usb pen),
-read faulty devices (with bad sectors for instance),
-perform speed tests,-edit the partition table, view the boot sector ,-create a disk, create a partition,-extend / shrink a volume.

Tool can be downloaded here or here
There are plenty of other tools (and possibly better) that can do the same.
What I was looking for was a GUI (no command line tool), merging several functionalities at once and free.

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Interests:I'm just a quiet simple person with a very quiet simple life living one day at a time..

European Union

Posted 19 July 2009 - 06:35 PM

Very good work, thank you for sharing.

I can definitively see some interest in using this tool to convert some physical server machines onto emulated machines.

Any chances of also adding support to create .VDI (Virtual Box) or .VHD (Virtual PC) images?

.VDI would be interesting because both VirtualBox and Ubuntu are what we currently use for running these emulated machines and .VHD would be interesting because of the support to boot directly from .VHD files on newer Windows platforms.

Nevertheless, it's already a very useful tool!

btw: Wouldn't this presentation be better placed on the project forge section?

It's a work in progress, the topic author seems a very good person to exchange questions about the inner functioning of this binary structure.

About project forge : I did not dare to post there

Are you kidding? This is a five star project forge entry!

I'm already imagining it as a tool to move an offline server or desktop OS onto a virtual machine or automate the whole OS backup as VDI onto another machine on the LAN to be used as direct replacement of the physical machine in case of hardware malfunction, very cool stuff.

OT, but not much, surprisingly the qemu-img.exe even in latest Qemu (0.10.5), which can be found here for Windows:http://www.bttr-software.de/qemu/appears not to have take notice of the success of Virtualbox and does not provide a conversion method for .vdi images:

Version 1.4 can now backup a physical disk to an VHD (VirtualPC) file.

I had to force heads to 16 and sectorspertrack to 63 (cylinders are then calculated on the total_sectors value of the source disk).
I am not sure (yet) if this is by the book but I was able to mount the VHD in a VirtualPC session and access my partitions from there.
I did not tested fully a boot from such a VHD file yet.

1/
If I convert my raw image with qemu-img, then vpc is happy.
qemu-img command line qemu-img convert -f raw -O vpc i:\w2k3.img g:\w2k3.vhd
But this is an offline cloning there, and I want to do a live cloning.

2/
If I launch my raw image in vmware, then clone my live-running system disk to vhd,
then next time in vpc gives me a c0000218 in failsafe mode or keeps rebooting after a forced chkdisk.
About the error c0000218 telling me it cant load the software hive, i can load it fine in regedit once extracted from the vhd file, so I know the hives are fine.

3/
If I launch my raw image in vmware, then clone my live-running system disk to a raw image,
then qemu launches fine, so does vmware.
That part is very handy (for me at least) but only covers vmware and qemu.

So I know my source is ok as I can launch it in vmware or qemu, or convert it via qemu-img, or even clone it live to a raw image and use it again in vmware or qemu.

So it has to be something with vpc.
Could it be a bad or mussing disk driver preventing me to boot all the way my dump to vhd?

I know that when I want to clone a live system I have to add some ide settings for qemu or add some scsi drivers for vmware.
I feel there is something similar to do for VPC but my vpc knowledge is light today.

Spreading the word on the Winimage Forum, where this kind of question is often asked.

It would be nice if you could post some more details of the successful procedure you put in practice.

jaclaz

Hi Jaclaz,

From within a running VM on w2k3, I launched clonedisk.I choose physicaldrive0 and dumped it to a VHD image on a network location.Once done, I shutdown my VM and launched successfully the VHD from VPC2007.Note that the first time I booted under VPC2007, some new hardware got detected and installed.So basically, I cloned a VMware image to a VirtualPC image, online.

I will now try the same with a physical source (a laptop for instance).

Why clonedisk does not have the option to convert from vmdk to image file? This would be very handy for me to test boot over iSCSI with VMWare.

Since I have already several VMware virtual machines (XP, Windows 7, Vista), by converting them to disk file images (.img) I can use them for Starwind iSCSI target.

Thank you.

Hi ktp,If these are fixed disk, I could add the option to clonedisk to convert them offline.What you can do already is to convert it online (i do that for all my vmware images) :boot on your vm, launch clonedisk, and backup to raw image to a network location (your iscsi target / server for example).

Regards,Erwan.

edit : about the online vs offline discussion, clonedisk is more into online cloning in order to move from one target to another.the vmdk is not a convert operation but merely the creation of a vmdk pointer to a raw image.so that to extent, as pointed out by Jaclaz, qemu-img tool is more adapted.